It might have been a kindness to let them know where she was and what she was doing: A single letter was found some years later among Len’s ‘effects’—two bottles of vodka, a pot of peanut butter and several copies of The S.A. Commercial Traveller in which he appeared, as a young man, in a group photograph — when he died in a home for the chronically sick in what had since become Zimbabwe. Dear Len, You probably know I’m working now, I’ve got a fun job in advertising?! I hope to make a career. It’s great to be independent and I’m lucky not to be alone. I have a wonderful boyfriend, quite a bit older, he’s about thirty and a writer. Nothing to do with advertising — he doesn’t approve of that! We may leave the country; he is half Canadian, with — he says — some Red Indian blood from way back. But we won’t go to Canada, thank goodness, I don’t like the idea of cold countries. And he’s never lived there. Maybe we’ll pass your way. I know you’re in the North now, and it’s soon going to be a separate country from Rhodesia, they say. But maybe you’ll come back down to Salisbury?
I don’t know whether or not to say I’m sorry about Billie, but I am. I’ll send this, with love, to the old address, in the hope someone will post it on.
Five majuscular X kisses and the signature: Hillela
It was not quite true that she was independent at that time: she still collected her stipend supplied by what her lover called her ‘rich aunt’, putting that aunt at a further remove by the loss of a name. It was justified, though an eighteen-year-old’s boastfulness, to make some claim for him as a writer. The yard cottage was padded with cuttings. The suitcases under the bed were so heavy with manuscript notes they could not be shifted by Hillela when she wanted to clean the floor — an immense physical gratitude moved her, she was quite housewifely, doing for him all the things — washing shirts, sewing on buttons — Olga’s males had done for them by servants, and Pauline’s males (in the case of loose buttons and holes in socks) were expected to do for themselves.
He talked about ‘his book’ as a companion and a leg-iron by which he had been shackled a long time, dragging it around the world with him. It depended before whom its existence was confirmed or denied; sometimes he said five years’ work was already virtually completed, at others he said dismissingly he was going to scrap all that, events had overtaken him (in Marxist company, the version was History had done this), corrected perspective, and at other times he would lug out a suitcase and spend a whole night rewriting a sheaf of its contents, while she slept. Next morning the result would be pitched into the suitcase along with older papers flattened under their own weight. He never discussed ‘his book’ with her and she did not expect him to, assuming its political nature gave it the status of classified: after an enjoyable day in the white-wine camaraderie where a shampoo was being transformed by lyrical images into an elixir of youth, or smoking a particular brand of cigarette was in the process of becoming a ritual of success and distinction, she came home to someone who was almost certainly doing the kind of things most admired and seldom successfully aspired to, in the Pauline home. There, they would have regarded ‘his book’ as something more important than himself, than his girl, than the lovers together; for her, it was present as someone he had known before her, before she was even grown up, with claims she must walk round on the quiet rubber soles of respect.
Of course — correcting perspective — hadn’t she always lived in the eye of the storm? That eye that meteorologists say is safe, a ball of security rolled up in fury, that eye that was whiteness. Pauline, given away by wild-blown hair, put her head out into the cyclone briefly. Others went out and did not come back. But fixedly, the white eye was on itself; Mandela came up from Underground that year with the gales of August that sandpapered the city with mine dust, while white children were waiting for the segregated swimming pools to be opened on September 1st. He went on trial in October for inciting the strike of the previous year and for leaving the country illegally; by then Olga was already planning ahead for December holidays at Plettenberg Bay, phoning friends who, like her, had houses there, to make sure there would be enough young company to keep her sons amused. Fire-bombs continued to explode, according to the news. There had been that ghastly murder of whites in their caravan at Bashee Bridge; but the numerous well-organized caravan camps throughout the official recreation areas of the country were whites-only and perfectly safe. As for the murders of headmen in the Transkei who collaborated with government officials — who knew a headman? All that was ignored as tribal unrest among black peasants. It was satisfactorily reassuring that the last communist front organization, the Congress of Democrats, had been banned in September. And the Sabotage Act was passed, defined widely to include strikes as acts of sabotage — restoring confidence to industrialists while Pauline and Carole had eggs thrown at them from a city balcony when taking part in the last public protest march before the Act put an end to such demonstrations for the duration — of what? The regime was then already in its fifteenth year.
That year when Hillela was living in the city with some man was the same year when torture began to be used by the police. Political suspects — mostly black — who, defended by lawyers like Joe, made such allegations when and if they could get to the courts, were dismissed from any concern of most white people, put out of mind as isolated agitators, left-overs of communist influence who had to be dealt with somehow; liars by ideology, who either invented injury or — looking at the issue paradoxically but righteously — deserved it anyway. And even those who were humanely and morally opposed, on principle, to beatings, applications of electric shocks, disorientation by extended denial of sleep, generally took their stand from under the centre of the white eye’s hypnotic gaze. A doctor who had given vital testimony of torture that won the case Joe’s team brought on behalf of a black man in a provincial town, described over a drink in the Pauline house his appalling findings on the man’s body, and concluded: —By the way, Joe … while you were appearing in Durban, were you ever invited to the Club? I was given a surprisingly good lunch there … a charming place, lovely old colonial style … I really enjoyed it.—
Pauline stared into her glass. — How did you reconcile the two?—
He smiled and quizzed, not following.
She read the dregs of wine as if they were tea-leaves. — Your morning in court. Your evidence. What you’d seen. And the Club.—
He smiled again, broadening the understanding to encompass Joe, anyone. — But they had nothing to do with each other!—
Easy then, with hindsight, to sneer at what was only a young girl excited by the exhibitionism she was too naive to distinguish from concomitant courage; the ex go-go dancer nested amid testimony of horror, happy in the midst of torture. By day she chilled the white wine, at night she was in the alternating current of the man’s frustration and resolve, the thrilling tension into which, in his command of her body, he converted the dreadful happenings around her. He raged through a thinned line of mouth at the poor press coverage of revolutionary actions. He disappeared from the yard cottage for days. She was to tell no-one he had gone away; if anyone phoned or called in, he was simply out for a while. This was an important task she had. His reports of what he had seen of the scale of resistance coming from blacks pushed back to starve in the Bantustans, of the violence used by the police against rural people, of the sour and lethal misery this caused between government-paid headmen and desperate villagers — she watched him tear up these reports (rejected by his editors) in a tantrum and throw them into the big bin that served the main house as well as the cottage. She had once cast certain papers in other people’s dirt, like that. But, these bits of paper she helped pick out again from under eggshells and vegetable peelings. They taped facts together; he sat down and wrote an article using the same material, but in the context of an accusation — press collusion with white domination. This, like the articles he wrote on concealed evidence of torture, she took in her elegant souvenir sling bag to the advertising agency; although the piece would be published under an alias abroad, its author might be traced by the identification of his typewriter with the typescript — it had happened to other journalists, before: envelopes addressed to newspapers, or even to cover addresses, were opened at the post office before despatch and photocopied for the secret police. It was another important task for her: the sipping and banter of copywriters and models going on around her, she made her fair copy of subversive documents on one of the agency typewriters. — Time off for a love-letter? I don’t blame you, love, they work us to extinction in this loony bin, can’t call a thought your own. — It was with this (genuinely female) art director whose yellow-veined blue eyes stood out like an octopus’s from a mound of forehead that the girl fell to the childish, vain temptation one day to hint that she was ‘sometimes scared’ on behalf of Rey, with whom, it was generally known in temporary pairings-off hardly kept count of, the little junior assistant had ‘got together’ at an agency lush. The woman whose loose, black-dyed hair was designed to make her look more like an elder sister than a mother not only picked up at once the scent of political danger holed up in its love-nest, was stirred by it and passed it on as a rill of risk to touch the agency with daring-by-association; she was also the one who kept absolute discretion when the girl’s confidence was taken further. What Sasha had feared did come to pass, but not when he was looking for his cousin in the cinemas where they had spent autumn afternoons. While electric currents were passing through the reproductive organs of others, Hillela had an abortion. It was arranged for her in good hands, by the kindness and understanding of the woman art director. Hillela was nineteen. It happened inside her; her body, her life: and the torture was one of the things he — Rey — had ways of knowing about, outside.